ConcreteJungle

As I step from hardwood floors to concrete pavement, I enter a jungle that is just as wild as the Amazon and even more dangerous, if not for my body, then for my soul and my sanity. I’ve been captured and placed inside a vessel that keeps me chained to the physical. I keep trying to break free…
But I’m bound behind these bars…like cages. So I turn metal into words and turn these bars into bars to release me from this box I’m trapped in.

An endless cycle of consequences born of Pandora’s box when humanity becomes masochistic in it’s predictability. Because life is nothing but a box and I’m tired of being boxed in, trying to think outside the box but all that happens is I get put inside a box six feet under for trying to break the cycle. I’ve spent countless hours in front of a box…TV, watching shows that taught me life lessons so I wouldn’t be square connected, to my Xbox 360, which lies beside a shoebox filled with memories of past relationships I call my ex-box. And I’ve spent hours watching a box on Youtube inside of another box I see as my monitor inside of a box I recognize as my bedroom, but these boxes are almost never the same when it gets twisted around like Rubik’s cubes. I step outside the box I call my house and walk down the street on a sidewalk composed of boxes made of concrete watching metal boxes whiz past me. As soon as I get to school I’m stuck doing work and listening to lectures in a box…classroom, in hopes that I can graduate to an institution of higher learning to learn in a bigger box known as lectures halls. All with the goal of getting a diploma that I can frame inside a glass windowed box, so I can work behind a desk in a way smaller box…office. But in the end, we all end up in the same box to decompose.

My hope of changing the direction my life is headed, is just like a game of checkers, because as I stand inside this 4 sided square staring at the finish line, I can never head straight for it. Instead I must hop over obstacles to travel faster taking advantage of others, in constant fear of losing everything as I become a stepping stone for the opposition.
I’m being pressed in from six directions and my bones are beginning to become brittle from the pressure of the earth on my shoulders. I’ve gone through life hoping to become a predator in this concrete jungle, but in the end I’ve become the prey, praying for better days as I struggle to be more than just another link in the food chain.

Caged inside my own helplessness, I fight for survival, dreading the act of standing still, so my pen…never leaves these lined pages. The ink is the spring I run to for nourishment, the pure waterfall that refreshes it – my own awareness of reality. Using poetry, I free myself of invisible bonds as I step outside of the invisible metal box I have mimed around my consciousness. And with the wings I have grown from my temples, I head towards infinite skies of possibility in a future that is free of sides, and no intersections to be cornered into. So I managed to escape…